Thank you. Chairman And Chris was tough to follow. That was a good
flourish at the end, Judge. Congratulations on your nomination. Thanks
for spending time in my office with me.
Congratulations to your daughters and your family. More broadly.
This is a big day for lots of folks in your family.
Today, the Senate takes up our constitutional duty to advise the
president on his nominee to the Supreme Court. The Senate's advice
and consent clause in our role as especially important these days
when we all Republicans and Democrats
Agree that the nine justices of the court exercise a lot of power
over policy decisions, surely much, much more power than our Constitution's
framers ever anticipated.
So let's talk about how we got into this mess. We're here, in part
because of decades and decades of recklessness by all three branches,
not just one, but by all three.
Congress. The article one branch fails to carry out our tasks responsibly
and regularly rather than make tough policy choices. We pass incredibly
vague laws and then just push the details on down Pennsylvania Avenue
to unelected bureaucrats in the article to branch
Then the head of the executive branch. Meanwhile,
Whichever party he or she comes from grabs more and more power with
their pens and their phones.
And finally, the Supreme Court at the top of Article three tends
to overstep the bounds that the Constitution sets on judicial power.
The court has ignored restrictions on its authority, inserting itself
into policy debates. They're supposed to be entrusted exclusively
to the two political branches. And what do we mean by that? What
do we mean when we say articles One and two are political?
It means that the people are in power over articles one and two,
but not in the long term. Over Article three. The men and women in
Article one and Article two are supposed to be answering directly
to the American people and importantly, the American people get to
hire us or get to fire us every 24 or six years.
But rather than honor the rules given to each branch activist judges
who served the powers given to articles one and two, which articles
one and two were complicit in this overreach.
Many years of corroding our constitutional order have contributed
to the polarization and the viciousness that are poisoning our politics.
More broadly, we all know that our civic health and our civic life
is not healthy and as was mentioned at the beginning of the hearing.
It's at least good that this one got kicked off without a bunch of
yokels having to be arrested and carried from the room when
Chairman. Grassley tried to speak a couple years ago. One of these
it took like an hour to get started. That kind of nonsense. The theatrics
that happen at these hearings are because of a broader problem.
As Textualists and originalists have sought to return the court to
its historic role. The Supreme Court nomination process has been
increasingly punctuated with not just those theatrics but also with
lots of personal attacks. That's not what this process is supposed
to be.
This process is supposed to be a careful, thorough investigation
of the nominee's record to help the Senate make an informed decision
on the nominees Fitness for a lifetime appointment. That's why these
hearings are supposed to be different, not because people act like
Jack wagons, but because the people before us nominated by the president
or potentially going to serve for a lifetime.
That office. Supreme Court justice is incredibly important yet it's
also carefully circumscribed precisely because it's a lifetime responsibility,
but we know that it's been a long time since this process has worked
like that. Instead, this is often a staging ground for nasty evidence
free personal attacks.
We started down this road of character assassination in the 19 eighties
with Judge Bork's hearings and senators have been engaged in disgusting
theatrics ever since the most recent Supreme Court nominee was subjected
to repeated accusations that were nothing more than unfiltered religious
bigotry against her.
The nominee before her was accused of serial rape.
Aided by members of this committee.
If this process were conducted in good faith Miguel and Estrada and
Janice Rogers Brown might well be on the Supreme Court today, but
their opponents lied and bullied rather than accepted, principled
minority judges. We've gotten so used to this kind of bullying that
two years ago.
The current Senate majority leader, stood on the steps of the United
States Capitol and screamed threats against two sitting justices
of the Supreme Court that they would quote reap the whirlwind.
If they ruled in a way that didn't align with Chuck Schumer's political
preferences. That's weird.
We should all be able to pause and say that's weird. That kind of
behavior shouldn't happen.
This process is broken, but it's a product of a broader Brokenness.
In the erosion of our constitutional structure. A lot of people are
willing to take a sledgehammer to the structure if it offers them
a quick political win.
And it's no coincidence that has more of us embrace and ends justifies
the means philosophy of our jobs.
Which are supposed to be jobs of public trust or politics becomes
uglier, more brutal and more pathological.
Well, we have an opportunity today to do something different, and
we can demonstrate that the Congress can carry out its constitutional
duty responsibly without a lot of that past ugliness. Judge Jackson
has served for the last nine months on the prestigious US Circuit
Court of Appeals for the D C circuit.
And before that you spent eight years on the D C District court.
She has a long record of public service and a long roster of colleagues
and friends who will testify to her professionalism.
The president believes that she should have a lifetime seat on the
Supreme Court, and it's the job of this body to evaluate that recommendation
on its merits. So what should we be looking for? We should start
with judicial philosophy.
The Senate should have a good sense of the principles that will guide
a nominee's decision making on the bench.
A robust and thorough judicial philosophy can help help us understand
how, when faced with difficult or unprecedented decisions, as the
court occasionally is, And I would just like to compliment Senator
Coons a minute ago, mentioning that huge, huge share of decisions
that come out of the Supreme Court or actually 9 to 0. They just
tend to not be the ones that make the headlines.
But they're incredibly important and the public trust that we need
to restore and all three branches of government would be well served
by us paying more attention to some of those 90 decisions, but the
ones that tend to be most contentious.
And the ones that tend to generate the most headlines are the occasions
where judges have to figure out what they do in areas which are gray
and ambiguous where the law might not be clear.
And so it makes. It's incredibly important for a judge to tell us
how she or he works out those principles in times that are new and
confusing. This will make their rulings more durable and sound, and
it will help rebuild public trust in the court and in the government
more generally.
Unfortunately, too many of the court's decisions do not rest on solid
constitutional foundations and reliable legal reasoning. Justices
have too often written decisions to claim partisan policy victories
and then retrofit bad legal reasoning or political decision making
to justify that ruling.
Some of the most divisive cases in the courts. Recent history fit
that bill. It's for that reason that while we should all respect
the Ginsburg rule the idea that judges sitting before this panel
should not weigh in on hypothetical cases that are likely to come
before the court nominees do nonetheless have a duty to be very clear
about their judicial philosophy.
Their legal views and their interpretive principles. The American
people should not be asked to consent to any nominee who operates
on principles that are obscure, confused or concealed. That means
that each of us has a job to do in these hearings. It is our job
on the Senate Judiciary Committee to ask questions that helped give
the American people a clear view of the nominee.
It's Judge Jackson's job to make her philosophy clear and well understood,
and at the end of a constructive hearing and nominee will have given
us a good sense of how she thinks about the constitutional structure
what it does and doesn't do and the key pillars that support it most
fundamentally the separation of powers and are carefully calibrated
system of checks and balances.
Throughout this process, we should all remember that the Supreme
Court Justice is not a lawmaker by another name. A Supreme Court
justice performs a crucial but limited function in our political
system, namely, to interpret and fairly apply the text of the law
as written and as understood at the time it was adopted.
Forthcoming nominee will make clearer commitment to uphold that purpose,
which is the court's true purpose, not the purpose concocted for
it by decades of political use, abuse and overreach.
A good nominee will show a commitment to the strict protection of
enumerated rights, not the fabrication of UN enumerated rights through
contorted readings. An excellent nominee will offer a robust judicial
philosophy that make sound decisions more likely, and more trusted
by the public.
Chairman. I look forward to hearing from Judge Jackson this coming